was love, and
it was a mystery.... But that song could not have been to his mother. He
could not imagine her being generous with even a white arm. And none
would want to be with her on a strand without food or sleep; that he
instinctively felt. She was a high, proud cliff, stern and proud and
beautiful, and that song was a song of May-time and the green
rushes....

And other songs of his father's were sung: "Maidne Fhoghmhair--Autumn
Mornings," and "In Uir-chill an Chreagain--In the Green Graveyard of
Creggan...."

A queer thing that all that should be left of his father was a chill
silence and a song a man might raise at the rising of the moon....

Silent he was in his grave, dumb as a stone, and all his uncles were
silent, too, barring the little smile at the corners of their mouths,
that was but the murmuring of the soul.... There were paintings of them
all and they young in the house, their high heads, their hawks' eyes,
Alan and Robin and Mungo.... And Mungo, too, was dead with Wellington in
the Peninsula. He and three of his men were all left of the Antrim
company. "Christ! have I lost this fight, too?" He laughed and a French
ball took him in the gullet. "Be damned to that!" He coughed. "He might
have got me in a cleaner place!" And that was the end of Mungo....

And Alan had gone with Sir John Franklin to the polar seas, and come
back with the twisted grin. "'T was a grand thing you did, Alan, to live
through and come back from the wasted lands." "'T was a grand thing they
did, to find the channel o' trade. But me, I went to find the north
pole, with the white bear by the side of it, like you see in the
story-books. And I never got within the length of Ireland o' 't! Trade,
aye; but what's trade to me? It's a unco place, the world!"

His father he could imagine: "Poor Colquitto Campbell! He wanted to bark
like an eagle, and he made a wee sweet sound, like a canary-bird! Ah,
well, give the bottle the sunwise turn, man o' the house, and come
closer to me, a _bheilin tana nan bpog_, O slender mouth of the kisses!"
His father, wee Shane thought, must have worn the twisted grin, too.

He knew what the twisted grin meant. It meant defeat. He had seen it on
his Uncle Alan's face when he lost the championship of Ireland on the
golf links of Portrush. And that morning he had been so confident! "'T
is the grand golf I'll play the day, and the life tingling in my
finger-tips!" And great golf he did play, with his ri